Andy Beckett's Blog, page 23
December 12, 2016
From Trump to Brexit, power has leaked from cities to the countryside | Andy Beckett
As the most successful British and American cities have gentrified and repopulated in recent decades, reversing the inner-city decline of the 60s and 70s, it’s become a cliche to say how powerful they are: economically, culturally, politically. Many people think they’re too powerful. A revolt against urban liberalism and multiculturalism, and their supposed imposition on the rest of the population, was a big element of the Brexit and Donald Trump campaigns.
Almost two-thirds of US rural and small-town voters chose Trump, while a similar proportion in the cities chose Hillary Clinton. In the English countryside, 55% voted for Brexit, while cities as varied as Bristol, Glasgow, Cardiff, Liverpool and London voted even more decisively for remain. The stark and growing political division of the US and the UK by population density has been one of the most striking, if under-reported, revelations of the great 2016 electoral reckoning.
Related: Think the north and the poor caused Brexit? Think again | Zoe Williams
Related: These boundary changes aren’t gerrymandering. They redress imbalance | Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Continue reading...
November 22, 2016
Vertical by Stephen Graham review – class war from above
Cities are now segregated by height, with the world’s wealthiest living high, argues this fascinating book
Some weeks ago, the director of the Tate galleries, Sir Nicholas Serota, had a spat with people living near Tate Modern that could have come from a satirical novel. They had complained that the gallery’s new 10th-floor public balcony looked directly into their glass-walled flats, which are in a nearby, slightly older tower complex and are each worth up to £19m. Serota tartly replied that the residents should “put up a blind or a net curtain”, “as is common” in most homes.
Related: This brutalist world: from Rotterdam's 'vertical city' to Tokyo's capsule tower – in pictures
Graham’s focus on the malign sides of ever more vertical urban life is powerful and thought-provoking
Continue reading...November 14, 2016
Revenge of the tabloids – podcast
Rocked by the phone-hacking scandal and haemorrhaging readers, the rightwing tabloids seemed to be yesterday’s news. But now, in Theresa May’s Brexit Britain, they look more powerful than ever
Continue reading...October 26, 2016
Revenge of the tabloids | Andy Beckett
Two years ago, when the UK had a future in the European Union and Ed Miliband was a potential prime minister, the chief business commentator of the Financial Times, John Gapper, announced the demise of Britain’s rightwing tabloids. Unusually for an FT journalist, Gapper had once worked at the Daily Mail, and at the FT he often writes about the media, sweepingly and authoritatively even by that paper’s standards. “The era of the Fleet Street tabloids, the populist and fearsome emblems of British culture and politics, is over,” he wrote on 25 June 2014. “It has been over for some years, in fact, but neither they nor their critics chose to admit it.”
He pointed to their shrunken print circulations: in 1950 the Daily Express was “the world’s best-selling paper”, he wrote, and “sold more than 4m copies each day”. Yet by 2014 it was selling barely a ninth of that; and it has weakened further since. “The tabloids appeal to a readership limited by class, occupation, and social attitude,” Gapper continued. “That is not sufficient in the digital era. Young people are not loyal to one tabloid title and few of them will subscribe online.”
The need for broadcasters to be balanced, once seen as a threat, has created a market for tabloid shrillness
During the Cameron governments, it felt like Murdoch and Dacre were the adults, and the politicians were children
Continue reading...October 4, 2016
Substance: Inside New Order by Peter Hook review – as debauched as Led Zep
The band’s bassist gives full details of drugs, groupies and excesses on tour, but his account of New Order’s voyage to becoming a pop institution remains haunted
When I was 13, in 1983, I spent several weeks trying to like a new LP called Power, Corruption & Lies. There was no band name, or band photos, or song titles on the record sleeve, which was dominated by a doomy old painting of a basket of roses, bone-coloured blooms against a dark backdrop. The music seemed equally forbidding: long, circling, incremental songs, with a small-voiced singer trudging across great expanses of bass and drums. Most British pop then was much brighter and less mysterious. The older boys at school noted my choice of listening with approval.
Over the 33 years since, New Order have gone from cult taste to pop institution – pioneers of both dance music and rock, co-writers of England’s only decent World Cup song, global performers of addictive, happy-sad hits such as “True Faith” and “Blue Monday” – in a way that would have bewildered earnest early fans like me. This book, by the band’s bassist Peter Hook, aims to be “the most complete and truthful record of life inside New Order as is humanly possible”. It is as self-importantly long as a Victorian novel.
Continue reading...September 13, 2016
Hinterland: A Memoir by Chris Mullin review – the Labour left always gets demonised
A leftwinger who wrote A Very British Coup and campaigned to free the Birmingham Six, Mullin also worked with Blair. This is another canny memoir
Chris Mullin is a bit of a mystery. A leftwing troublemaker who managed to serve in the Blair government; a weedy-looking operator who took on the police and the IRA to free the Birmingham Six; an idealistic socialist reporter who freelanced for the Sun and Telegraph; a dedicated parliamentarian who did not enter the Commons until he was 39; a writer of conspiratorial novels who reinvented himself as a self-deprecating, almost cosy political diarist – Mullin, now 68, has folded together multiple careers more like a Victorian than a modern MP.
Hinterland is another canny, deceptively casual Mullin performance. Covering his whole life, including phases already covered by his highly successful diaries, this slim book begins as a series of loosely connected anecdotes, after-dinner in tone, apparently random in their chronology, about the Labour party in the 70s and 80s. Mullin describes a boisterous, off-duty union leader, Norman Willis, a “long-winded” Neil Kinnock, and Tony Benn’s tumultuous 1981 challenge for the Labour deputy leadership. It’s all vivid stuff; but anyone who knows the party’s history will be familiar with most of it already.
His relationship with his wife in postwar Vietnam is recalled with a melodrama that could almost be Graham Greene
Continue reading...July 19, 2016
The fight for Labour’s soul – what the party’s brutal 1981 split means today
Labour is in crisis. The bitter divide across the party echoes the acrimony that drove the ‘gang of four’ to form the breakaway SDP. Will history repeat itself?
On a mild winter Sunday morning 35 years ago, political reporters were instructed to go to a riverside house in east London, and to wait outside for an important announcement. Inside were four former Labour ministers, all well-known national figures: Shirley Williams, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins. Over the previous year and a half, they had met with growing frequency, and written articles and given interviews that suggested a common disenchantment with Labour. They had become known by an increasingly expectant media as the gang of four.
In 1981, as now, British politics was in a state of rare flux. Margaret Thatcher was an inexperienced prime minister. Her austere economic and public-spending policies seemed disastrous. Meanwhile, the Labour opposition was being ineffectually led by Michael Foot, like Jeremy Corbyn a faintly otherworldly leftwinger in his late 60s. Under Foot, as under Corbyn, the party was becoming an unmanageable cauldron of leftwing and centrist factions, of London social liberals and northern social conservatives, of working-class trade unionists and middle-class constituency activists, of party loyalists and “entryists” – infiltrators from other, more confrontational leftwing groups such as Militant.
Related: Dear Labour, split the party and you’ll regret it. Love from an SDP candidate | Polly Toynbee
Continue reading...July 12, 2016
The fall and rise of the council estate
For decades, the Aylesbury estate in south London has been seen as a symbol of the failure of British social housing. But now – just as it is being demolished – many people are starting to think again
Aysen Dennis loves her flat. Two bedrooms, a neat kitchen-diner, a cosy living room, lots of light, a separate toilet and bathroom, and a much broader hallway than in the poky million-pound Victorian houses that surround her in south London – all for £110 a week, plus £30 heating and service charge. Her flat is warm, and no one can see into it. “I feel free in my home,” she told me recently. “I can take off my clothes without worrying about curtains.” She still has the original 1960s kitchen cupboards, miracles of space-saving and clever joinery. South London hipsters would love them.
Dennis is not a hipster. She is 57, single, and has been unemployed for four years. She used to work in a women’s refuge. Before that, three decades ago, she came to London from Turkey: a leftwing activist fleeing the aftermath of a military coup, during which she had been shot at and imprisoned, and some of her friends had been killed. After a few uneasy years in squats and shared properties – “the husband of my last housemate was a racist” – she moved into her flat in the spring of 1993.
Related: Housing estates: if they aren’t broken…
Related: Revealed: how developers exploit flawed planning system to minimise affordable housing
Continue reading...July 4, 2016
What to expect from the Chilcot inquiry: revelation or whitewash?
It has been seven years in the making at a cost of £10m and runs to 2.6m words. Chilcot’s report into the Iraq war finally nears publication, but will it be worth the wait?
Seven years and several political eras ago, on 15 June 2009, prime minister Gordon Brown made a typically grave statement in the House of Commons. “With the last British combat troops about to return home from Iraq,” he said, “I am today announcing the establishment of an independent inquiry which will consider the period from summer 2001, before military operations began … and our subsequent involvement in Iraq right up to the end of July this year. The inquiry is essential … Its scope is unprecedented … It will have access to all government papers, and the ability to call any witnesses.” Brown concluded: “I am advised that it will take a year.”
In June 2009 the Labour government was ailing after a dozen years in power. Less than a year from the next general election, according to the pollsters Ipsos MORI it was close to being pushed into third place by the Liberal Democrats. One of the main reasons for Labour’s divisions and decline then – and ever since – was the 2003 Iraq war so determinedly pursued by Brown’s predecessor, Tony Blair. The Lib Dems, many Labour voters, and MPs on the Labour left such as Jeremy Corbyn had opposed it. Other Labour MPs, including Tom Watson and Angela Eagle, had supported it. The Chilcot inquiry, as it soon became known after its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, a retired civil servant with a gentle manner, was Brown’s attempt to calm some of the enormous party-political, geopolitical and military disorder Iraq had unleashed – and to ensure that such a foreign policy disaster did not happen again.
Related: Tony Blair faces calls for impeachment on release of Chilcot report
Continue reading...July 1, 2016
Margaret Thatcher didn’t cause Brexit – but Brexit will bring back Thatcherism | Andy Beckett
Like a familiar blanket grabbed on a stormy night, since the referendum last week a conventional wisdom has quickly formed on the left that the result was largely a protest against the polarisation of Britain begun by Margaret Thatcher. It’s an appealing argument: as if the “left behind” Brexit voters in northern Britain were descendants of the mutinous Liverpool dole claimants in Alan Bleasdale’s 1982 drama Boys from the Blackstuff.
Related: If you think Britain is angry and divided, look at the continent | Timothy Garton Ash
Following Brexit, the 'left behind' look most vulnerable, given their lack of secure employment and economic power
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